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How About A Taxi Share

Submitted by John Geraci on 15 December 2008 - 1:33pm to Discussions.

I had an idea over the weekend for an app that would allow people who wanted to share the cost of a taxi together to find each other in a city. This would be a very straightforward app to build, no? Match up people for starting point and destination point, along with time of departure. Make it a system that operates on the fly, people can look for a taxi share just a few minutes before their departure.

Could work well in cities at night, when mass amounts of people are leaving bars, restaurants, clubs, etc in nightlife areas and heading to residential areas. And for that matter, could work well the other way too, when mass amounts of people are leaving residential areas and heading to the restaurant, bar & club areas.

You could approach the safety issue in various ways if you wanted. Wont go into that here.

It's kind of like Dodgeball, but for after you leave the bar.

Could be very useful, money-saving to individuals, and could cut the # of solo taxi rides out there.

15 Dec22:26

Rideamigos

By vikas sapra

Take a look at Rideamigos, which was founded last year. It's initial goal was to exist as a cabsharing service, but it seems to be evolving into an event planning and corporate carpooling application. I continue to find problems with their search, which could contribute to the lack of adoption; however, the real obstacle is critical mass, which needs to be achieved on the initial launch. Otherwise there will be too many failed matching attempts.

Here are some ideas to achieve critical mass:
1) Use a tipping point model. Rather than launch a service and then garner users, do not launch until enough people agree to take action. For example, create a Facebook Page for people who want this service to exist and launch only when the Group reaches the desired number. During this time, display a prototype to the Group, share the business model, push PR, and ask users to facilitate in the development of the product.

2) Building on what you said, a Dodgeball-esque interface would be very appropriate. It also provides an effective marketing platform for local businesses. For example, if you're sharing a cab to the lower east side, you may see a sponsored text add notifying you of drink specials at The Magician. Local businesses could provide people incentives to sign up for the cabshare service and in return increase the frequency of their sponsored ads.

3) A traffic twitter-bot came out of the first challenge. Building on what we learned, a rideshare bot seems like a natural extension.

07 Apr16:03

the LGA taxi line

By burton

Every time I leave the baggage claim and get into the taxi line at LaGuardia, I wonder why people don't cooperate on this more. A ride into Manhattan costs a minimum $30. Sharing this ride with one other person would cut that in half, yet nobody has the courage to shout out, "Hey, who's going to Midtown?"

I do think a low-tech/no-tech solution to this problem would be better than a high-tech one, but people may be more willing to do it through a medium.

07 Apr16:32

I agree -- simply posting

By nickyg

I agree -- simply posting signs for separate lines -- "upper west side," "downtown brooklyn," etc, would facilitate this. But I don't think it's in the cab industry's interest to do this, since more rides mean more money. So I wouldn't expect the airports to implent this anytime soon.

What about tagging along with an existing travel-related service like Dopplr or even travelocity? e.g., "book your flight, and now... share a cab when you get there"

07 Apr16:41

DC Union Station taxi line

By eclisham

DC does this in a very low-tech way at Union Station: the dispatcher gets the destination neighborhood of the person at the front of the line, then rounds up as many people further back in line going to that neighborhood as will fit in the cab. I have a vague recollection (and am well out of my comfort zone here) that legally passengers must share cabs in DC when demand is heavy, so perhaps the dispatcher is just the middle person in enforcing the regulation equitably. But the incentive to play along is universal when you're standing in a cab line of 50 people or more, so it does work; it just takes a lot of yelling and makes the dispatcher into kind of a carnival barker.

I still think it could be made more efficient through mobile technology -- enter your destination via cell phone as you pass a dispatch checkpoint, which notes the time of the entry, then you get a text from the dispatcher when a ride is available. This works really well managed locally with one common starting point, but it should be just as doable with dispersed starting points.

07 Apr19:04

low-tech vs. high-tech

By John Geraci

I'm totally for low-tech solutions when they work, and maybe the case could be made for that here.

The main advantage I see to the high-tech route is that it allows you to leverage friend networks so that you can potentially share rides with friends-of-friends, and that might be more appealing than sharing a ride with a complete stranger who happens to be standing on a corner next to you.

As I see it, a big barrier to taxi sharing is probably not wanting to share a ride with a total stranger. But sharing a ride with someone in your extended friend network would totally change that equation.

Not saying for sure, just posing that as a theory.

07 Apr19:09

tagging along

By John Geraci

> What about tagging along with an existing travel-related
> service like Dopplr or even travelocity?

I think that makes sense. I was thinking that building it on top of Foursquare seems perfect - lets you leverage that "where are people in my friend network around me right now?" thing they do so well. But Dopplr and Travelocity would work equally well, in different situations.

Maybe the thing to do would be to build a generic "taxi sharing" application, centralized, open source, API'd, and let any service that wants to tap into it?

Anyone from Foursquare or Dopplr or even Travelocity want to comment on this?

(BTW, if someone wants to go the low-tech route and post a bunch of signs around their city in a DIY effort, don't let me stop them.)

07 Apr19:27

great idea -- it's more

By naveen

great idea -- it's more likely that you'd want to try to share with friends (or friends-of-friends) first before hitting the share-with-anyone route.

a foursquare API has been in internal use for a couple of months. there's still a bit more to clean up -- and we hope to have it live for everyone to use in the next month.

07 Apr20:57

cool naveen - can you give

By John Geraci

cool naveen - can you give the list a heads-up when the Foursquare API goes live? could be very interesting to play with.

14 Apr17:29

...or the airport!

By xinroman

I always take a car to the airport when I go, but it costs about $40 each way. I've often thought about being able to team up with someone from my area and share a ride to JFK together to split the cost. This kind of service wouldn't need to be quite as "on the fly" as just grabbing a cab home from a bar - you could even sign up for days in advance to find someone to coordinate with.

At any rate, the whole concept reminds me a lot of what people started doing last year during the MTA strike - posting ads to Craigslist for ride shares and car shares to and from work.

14 Apr18:50

Re: ...or the airport!

By John Geraci

I always take a car to the airport when I go, but it costs about $40 each way. I've often thought about being able to team up with someone from my area and share a ride to JFK together to split the cost.

So there are two types of ride shares being discussed in this thread: one is an on-the-fly type share, where you find yourself somewhere in the city and want to be somewhere else right now. The other (mentioned above) is where you plan a trip in advance (maybe even just a few hours) to go somewhere like the airport. The first requires ad-hoc matchmaking, from mobile devices. The second allows for planned matchmaking, from a website.
Both would be useful, interesting to build, and doable. Seems like the place to start would be to create a generic 'matchmaking' module that takes into account location, time, destination, and possibly degrees of separation in a friend network (if we wanted to consider friend networks in this) and matches people with each other.
Maybe that generic module could then be used for both the ad-hoc mobile taxi share app and the more planning-centric app?

28 May03:58

Cabcorner.com

By cabcorner

After reading most of the posts concerning cab sharing, I couldn't help but be amused in the way one can only be when ideas, thoughts and actions run in such perfect parallelism yet but wholly unaware of each others existence. I have been working on developing a comprehensive, intuitive cab sharing platform for exactly one year to the month and all of the concepts, reservations, excitement I have seen on display in these posts are the very same ideas and conclusions I came to. Of those thoughts came www.Cabcorner.com. For those of you who posted before me, I am sure you will have great feedback for me (if you are so inclined to visit the site) and for those who will post after me, I hope some of what I have done inspires you to find the solutions to the questions I did not fully address.